Ukip and its racist supporters: this is what happens when small parties grow too fast

All political parties involve an argument between activists who know what views their voters ought to have, and the voters they actually do have. Labour activists would like its voters to want to nationalise everything; in fact, most of them want to buy a house some day. The Conservatives are a free-market party whose voters are rather fond of the BBC and the NHS. The Liberals think of themselves as a centre party, but most of their voters thought they were getting Labour (without having to take responsibility for it). In Ukip the argument is particularly complicated and intense – and it's just been brought out into the open by the resignation of Sanya-Jeet Thandi, a British Asian leader of Ukip’s youth wing, who claims that the party is deliberately targeting “the racist vote”.

Most of the Ukip scandals don’t really matter, to the party itself at least. They’re the insurgents; they expect “the Establishment” to dig out another council candidate with a dodgy history on social media, or to receive another battering from The Times. It’s part of Ukip’s identity.

Ms Thandi’s resignation is different. This isn’t a story dug out by journalists or political opponents: this is a woman who’s been a member of the party for four years, who has gone on telly to defend Godfrey Bloom and was tipped by Nigel Farage as “rising star”.

This PR disaster matters because it represents the growing schism between what you might call “the two Ukips”.

There’s the first Ukip – Ms Thandi’s Ukip. These are the people who powered the party to its second-place finishes in Eastleigh, Rotherham and South Shields; these are the people who voted for Ukip in 2010. They are small-staters of various hues; they might divide between the more socially conservative shire Tories and the out-and-out libertarians, but they are a far cry from the other Ukip.

This second Ukip consists of new supporters who have overwhelmingly lost out from the social and economic changes of the last 50 years, and, as a result, would quite like to go back the Fifties. Put crudely, many of these people think Lenny Henry should go and live in a black country.

The question for Ukip has always been: can you successfully reconcile small-staters with voters who are to the Left of them on economic issues and to the Right on racial issues?

The evidence, increasingly, is that you can’t.

Eventually people stop seeing Nigel Farage, the libertarian and Establishment scourge, and see another Nigel Farage, a man who seems to spend a lot of his time surrounded by racists.

That’s not the media’s fault, and it’s not entirely Ukip’s either. This is what happens in small parties; particularly to small parties that become powerful parties very quickly.

Lift the lid and you’ll find all sorts of odd types in the Green Party, and don’t forget that the Minister of State at the Home Office – Norman Baker – is the type of conspiracy theorist who wouldn’t get as far as a borough council election if he wore a red or a blue rosette.

In small parties – even those like the Liberal Democrats whose ancestry stretches back centuries – the most eccentric of activists is only ever one good day from becoming an elected representative. As much as they hate the comparison, Ukip and the Liberal Democrats have far more in common with each other than they do with either of the big two.